Avenge the USSR in This Righteous Retro Arcade Game That Never Was

Prepare to enlist in Cosmonaut Vector Defense Force.

By
Giaco Furino

Oct 5, 2015

Rain slashes against an unassuming garage in Long Island. I can see bright light shining out from inside. As the garage door slowly opens, VEC9 - a brand new vector-based arcade game - is revealed. Andy Reitano, Michael Dooley, and Todd Bailey stand around the arcade cabinet, their baby, as the game's hypnotic music pumps out loud in the garage. I step in, I'm immediately offered a beer, and we get to work.

In VEC9 players take on the role of Yuri, a Soviet space pilot who's been in cryogenic sleep for thirty years. Upon waking, you assume that your radio silence from the U.S.S.R. means the worst, and your job becomes clear: Destroy America. You'll fly through an introductory escape level and four levels in the United States (San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C.), blasting down ships, avoiding mines, and wreaking havoc on the "Capitalist Pigs" of the USA. The game plays like a mix between the classic 1983 Star Wars vector game and Star Fox 64. And its release is impending, as it heads to Chicago to live at Logan Arcade. Before it makes its trek on November 7th, I had the chance to try it out and speak with the creators.

Andy Reitano, who also did work on the amazing brand-new NES game Star Versus, explains how the creation of this entire cabinet all came from a lucky Craigslist find. "I was looking around on Craigslist for old arcade cabinets, and this guy who I was buying this stuff from was like 'I have an Asteroids board and an Asteroids monitor' and that got my interest." A traditional video game monitor uses grids of glowing pixels, called raster graphics, but the Asteroids monitor is a vector monitor which creates its images from drawn lines of light. Think of the difference between drawing lines on a sheet of paper with with a ruler versus filling in dots on a sheet of graph paper. It's an old-school bit of tech, used on popular early '80s games like Tempest and Star Castle.

Reitano says vector graphics have a special touch he's always loved, "I remember how brilliant these games were." And he's right—the whites line on the monitor get intensely bright, and they glow in a very satisfying way, so different from the pixels that populated most arcade cabinets built in the 1980s and 1990s (or even the few indie arcade cabinets like Killer Queen made today).

The arcade cabinet is an imposing monolith, a piece of brutalist architecture you're meant to play.

The arcade cabinet itself is an imposing, heavy-looking monolith, like a piece of brutalist architecture you're meant to play. The screen screams with white light, the secondary monitor glows ATM-machine green, and it's all rimmed with sharp, harsh metal. The design, of both the graphics and the cabinet itself, came from figuring out a way to explain the mesh of current tech with vintage tech.

"We were trying to figure out plot-wise what made sense," said Todd Bailey. "Why would you have a vector display on something that was 3D? And that's when we came up with the story about frozen Soviet space pilots. Once I knew that it was about frozen Soviet space pilots then the aesthetic was easy. It's brutal, it's square, it will cut you, it has steel on it, there aren't bright colors."

But before that behemoth of cabinet could be built, the team already had the controller—which is its own kind of monster. Satisfyingly heavy, with six buttons, and precise responses, I'd assumed this was reclaimed from another vintage arcade game. "No way," Bailey laughs. "We were in Florida for work and we were at a surplus place and we found a shelf full of these weird M1A1 Abrams battle tank gunner controllers. This is a thing that a tank officer pulled the trigger on a lot of times. It may be out of a tank or it may be out of a training tool from a tank, but it definitely wasn't from a video game."

Once the game begins, the payer is faced with buttons (in Cyrllic) to press, triggers to pull, switches to flick, blinking lights, and a secondary screen showing full-motion-video clips of your enemies and bursts of information. Andy explains: "We wanted to really overwhelm the player with information," and there's a lot to look at, touch, and interact with in VEC9. So much so, that I found myself getting destroyed over and over again.

"We wanted to really overwhelm the player with information."

I asked the creators about the difficulty of the game, and they brought it back to its old-school ancestors, "Play Asteroids—you're going to die the first time you play that, too!" shouts Todd. "Play any game from that era. It was a different time, where it was about eating your quarter. You played it again because there wasn't anything else. It demanded more of a player. Pinball's even harder! You want it to be hard—but you don't want it to be cheap. You want a player to be mad at themselves, not mad at the game."

"Huge features of the game come from weirdo obsessions that each of us have," says Todd, "I was extremely inspired by this old Commodore 64 game Raid Over Moscow, and Andy came running in one day like 'I made a full motion video!' and we were like 'Okay, I guess that's in the game now too!'"

That enthusiasm, that excitement around this brutal, beautiful arcade cabinet made by three dudes in a garage in Long Island, is infectious. And I found myself up all night thinking about the game, thinking about how I could have turned sharper or fired sooner, thinking about how I failed my objective, and how I let Stalin down.

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